About User Experience

Every day, people struggle. They can’t use water faucets in stores, airports and hotels. They pull on doors that should be pushed. They abandon shopping carts at e-commerce sites and sometimes they abandon shopping carts at self-checkout lanes in brick and mortar stores. They cancel website registrations and online quote requests. They are confused by healthcare. They rent and buy cars with accessories (and sometimes basic functions) that are so hard to find and use, they must consult an owner’s manual. They overpay for products with features they don’t need or want. They uninstall mobile apps that they purchased days before. They pay more for services they don’t need or want, but cannot cancel. They call customer service because products don’t seem to work right. They try to return technology purchases because they cannot use them. They wonder why technology doesn’t work, and they curse the companies that make things so hard to use. Why are they paying for things that make their lives harder, not easier?

Sounds rather sad, doesn’t it? Fortunately, there are ways to build products, services, websites and mobile apps that are not only easy to use, but delightful. User Experience Design (UX) is an applied design methodology that solves business problems by starting with people, and designing products and solutions around how people behave.

UX reduces the friction between technology, business strategy, and customer goals. Even better, it pays dividends — not just in being preferred by new customers, or earning loyalty from existing customers — companies who embrace UX principles typically see measurable competitiveness in financial performance and other key performance indicators.